One of my original PC's (back in the mid-90s) was a XT/CGA setup and I used to spend hours "laplinked" to my dads "big computer" to scour readme files, discard anything that mentioned VB Runtimes (they don't work in real mode) and desperately tried to find anything interesting that'd load on my rig. I recall from back in the day there was quite a lot of Windows 1x/2x software that worked fine on 3.0/CGA and many titles written in turbo pascal targetting 3.x seemed to also work alright.

During mid 2020 (ISO) I randomly rekindled my fascination with Windows 3.0 and real-mode as I had acquired a nifty little Sharp PC-7100 based portable which has an 8086 processor, 640KB of RAM (well a smidge more now..) and an inbuilt CGA Mono LCD. I began searching once again for these apps and games and had them in a random assortment.

Enter this project - W3RMCSL my attempt to get some order and organization into my testing and to slowly build a useful archive and list of results based on the test platforms.

Release:
Currently 0.3 is the latest release and is still very much "under construction".
You can download the latest package here: http://4am.org/win3x/w3rm/W3RMCSL_03_20032021.zip (42MB)
For now the titles I've tested as "SCREEN" or "OK" are included in ZIP format within the package - unsure how long this approach will last.
I've also attached the test list here so people can just refer to this without getting the whole package..

Scope:
Current - 8086/8088, CGA/VGA, 640K - Windows 3.0a
Future/Proposed - 8086/8088/286/V30/V20, HERC/CGA/VGA, 640K - Windows 3.0a/Windows 2.03

How I test:
- 86box virtual machines set up as 8088 (usually with a fast clock) with DOS 3.31 and Windows 3.0a and CGA and VGA (hacked for 8088) drivers.
> Note: I am also starting a list for 286 and may also extend this to V20/V30 and this will use standard drivers or TVGA
- Launch the app, try to do basic functions (or bring up an about box) and then take a screenshot.
- Under CGA - if I get an app to start but it looks wonky or maybe doesn't fit properly I record the result as "SCREEN" which means, use with caution or it might not work.

My scope is to only include shareware/freeware or demos in the archive, commercial software will eventually be in the list (URLs will not be).
For the early releases I just used a few shareware compilation CD's.

Future Plans:
* Better way to detect duplicates
* Hardware testing results (eventually)
* Column for apps that will only work on 3.0 or higher (as to filter out 'legacy' 1x/2x real mode apps).
* Column for Windows 2.03 testing (this may fork) as this important release was the last one that supported running windows from floppy disks.
* Bring out the old TPW 1.0 and get coding 😀
* Figure out a better way to depict failures (ie. Runtime, System lock, other error message)
* Hardware testing:
- Sharp PC-7100 (8086/700K [100k used with drivers, more on that later]/CGA mono)
- Generic Turbo-XT Clone (8088/640KB/VGA)
- Generic Turbo-286 (640K/VGA)

Feel free to use anything you find useful in this project for your own.
I'm aware of at least one other attempt to do this sort of real mode testing and it's neat to see people are still interested in this!
If you know anyone who still uses real-mode Windows for any work or leisure it'd be good to capture some stories.